


What Millie Saw

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1634252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Millie arrived at her rather traditional arrangement with Christopher; a boyish interaction between two undercover Improvers in the dark.  Mostly takes place during Conrad's Fate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Millie Saw

**Author's Note:**

> I love stories that explore gay roles and relationships and how they fit into culture, especially in historical-type settings, so I decided to go with that here. I came up with the basic outline and was going to try to take this story further, but it wrote itself as an interstitial for  <i>Conrad's Fate</i>. If you care to do a story trade with me, dear recipient, after this is over, I'd be glad to write a future segment in exchange for non-secret goodies in the same fandom! :-)
> 
> Written for mushimimi

 

 

Out in the cricket field, in summer, we're waiting our turn and it starts to rain. Everyone from the castle all decides to crowd into the little gazebo nearby and eat their picnic lunches, but I don't want to be crowded in, so I decide to go walking back.

Rain the way it rains here is still strange to me, and all new. So it's really more of a weird attraction than an annoyance. And part of the fun of being ladylike and Millie-like is I get to be defiant sometimes.

Christopher catches me up, the silk handkerchief in his pocket going bright and funny in the rain, like a tropical bird who's gotten his feathers damp.

"Millie," he says. "Millie, I have something to ask you." For all his self-assurance, he's always rather awkward when he's trying to be romantic. When he's trying to be anything but his own, infuriating Christopher. I wait for him to continue. When he doesn't, I stop walking and look at him, quizzically.

This apparently counts as the right kind of response. "Millie, will you marry me?" he says, sopping and blinking at me handsomely. "I don't mean now. I mean later -- when we're both adults."

I burst out laughing because he's just so comical, but he looks grave.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand. Christopher, do you love me?"

"Well, I suppose so."

"Are you in love with me?"

"I suppose so. Maybe. How am I supposed to know that?" he says irritably.

"It isn't something you suppose you know, or not," I say, feeling _dead_ superior to be knowing this at my young age. Of course, this is mainly from reading Lowood House books, but they're simply so exciting that they have to be true. "It comes on you. Like a fit, or -- a shower of rain."

"It does?" He peers at me in that arrogant, affected way he gets. "I think that just happens when we get a little older, or something."

"Then why are you asking me now?"

His face goes a little blank. "I just thought it was a good idea to ask sooner rather than later. Advance planning. If I ask now, I'll be more inclined to fall in love with you later, don't you think?"

"Christopher," I tell him with the certainty no one can muster when they are not twelve or thirteen, "boys are _strange_."

We walk the rest of the way in silence, his steps following mine, one half-thump out of beat.

\---

I am fifteen and tired of being lost. Things work so differently in all of these variants, and the house keeps changing, staircases and terrible dusty towers and crumbling archways and the dark. There's lots of the dark and strange pieces of junk from other worlds. Never a living creature, except for that one witch messing me about.

Now it's very dark, night, and I've been wandering for days. I walk up a creaking spiral staircase to where I think there is a kitchen, only when I get to the top, no kitchen is there at all, but an attic room with the ceiling half fallen in. A funny, jagged black mirror is sitting against the wall. I say jagged, but it's like someone cut it out jagged; the edges don't look broken, and it has a gilt frame.

The mirror looks new, in the way that none of the rest of the house does. The dingy window shows me that it's night, the moon hanging dimly in the darkness. But that isn't what catches my attention. I look at the mirror, and it's clear to me that something is moving in it: something that isn't me.

I gasp and whirl around, but nobody is behind me. It's not that kind of a mirror, I see. So I walk closer to the image. It's blurry and strange -- two figures in a room. The room looks sort of like this one might, if it weren't half fallen in, which is why I mistook the thing for a normal mirror: those people are located in the room where they would be behind me, if that world were this one. It's horribly disorienting. It helps, though, that the two figures are boys, one lying in a bed, one sitting on the edge of it.

And then my heart goes in my throat, because I recognize the one sitting on the edge of the bed. It's Christopher! Or at least someone who looks very like him.

I concentrate on the mirror and will it to tune in strongly. I can't get the picture to tune in clearer, though; it must be that the physical material just isn't up to that much detail -- burnished rather than polished. But I hear the sounds from the room, twin to this one. There's a faint echo to the voices and the rustling.

"I do believe we're going to be in a great quandary," says the boy sitting on the bed. It does sound like Christopher. He puts his hand on his chin and rubs it thoughtfully. "Grant, what am I going to do?"

"Maybe Millie would know, when you find her," says Grant. He sounds younger than Christopher, a little. He sits up in his bed, pulling the covers up around his lap. I tune in even more intently, and the scene becomes clear, beyond the mirror, in my mind.

"Maybe Millie would know, or maybe she would be dreadfully upset. Those who risk the teeth and all. She used to be a living Goddess. Millie can be _terrifying,_ Grant." Christopher shifts restlessly, and snaps his fingers a few times lightly in the air. I can't quite make out his mannerisms visually, but I can see them, in my head.

Can I be so terrifying, I wonder? I seem to be the only one who doesn't think Christopher can be terrifying, so maybe I am. And why would I have cause to get terrifying at him?

I'm beginning to feel upset. He seems to be talking about something I don't know anything about and can't identify, and it is very strange to hear myself being discussed in the third person like that.

He goes on, when the boy Grant doesn't interject, and says, "On the other hand, to give Millie her due, she's quite fair-minded even when she's being terrifying. No matter how badly she felt, I can't imagine her telling a soul."

 _Tree-UMPH!_ I think to myself, glad to hear that I get good reviews even when I'm not present. That is what one of the more absurd teachers at the awful Swiss school would say when a girl got something right. I seem to have caught the verbal habit.

Grant is leaning closer to Christopher, his worried dark eyes catching the candlelight in the drafty room. He clutches the covers up over his arms and speaks. "What does it matter anyway? You don't want to know me for very long," he says. "I think my bad karma has a blast radius."

Christopher's eyes flash, and he looks annoyed. "Enough about that!" he says. "Don't underestimate me, Grant."

The younger boy gets a familiar look on his face. I know that look. I see it all the time. It is the look of despairing of Christopher's arrogance. But I also know that Christopher is largely right. He is not to be underestimated.

In what, I wonder for a moment -- until I see Grant lean closer, and then they are kissing each other on the lips. Shyly, but with a quiet sort of intensity. Not like brothers. They move during the kiss. Grant's hands go around Christopher's back.

It is so sudden, and unexpected, and also as plainly obvious as the sun coming up over the horizon. Of course. _Of course._

The mirror fuzzes out in my resulting moment of confusion, as I sit and blink and absorb the sudden revelation.

I try to think of how I could have missed for so long the reason why Christopher might be so awkward and foreign in his occasional romantic gestures to me. As if he was trying to speak a language he only half knew, and fill in the missing pieces with formality. So earnest, when he asked prematurely for my hand, and yet -- something wasn't quite right about it.

But he does love me. I know that, because I know him. I guess, there, we reach the problem of "love" and "in love."

I'm still filled with restless questions -- where _is_ Christopher? Somewhere else, obviously, but an adjacent world to here? Why, how? -- but the mirror, now silent, shows the two boys drawing themselves together, Christopher's arms enfolding his friend. And maybe they only mean to sleep, but simple respect for the private habits of others compels me to turn away from the mirror and walk back down the stair.

I am sad, because I love him too, and I don't know what could have been. But, I remind myself, I also still don't know what could be.

\---

At Chrestomanci Castle I am ill, shivering and hot at once. I'm half sick from the flu, and half from the rest of it. Knowing and not saying anything, learning to like Conrad-who-is-also-Grant, learning, even, to talk about Christopher with him: from working out the connection between the scene in the mirror and the people I am talking to, from biting my tongue and not embarrassing anyone, from resolving poor Conrad's awful difficulties and saving the world and facing up to DeWitt all while trying not to collapse.

And Conrad comes home with us, which makes it even harder to know what to say in front of DeWitt and all his people, so I look at them from time to time and shiver a lot.

I haven't had a moment alone with Christopher, except for fleeing and hiding moments. Those aren't good for any kind of conversation. But now he's tucking me into bed, pulling a down comforter over me, and I manage to stop my teeth chattering long enough to say, "Yes."

"Yes what?" He blinks at me, in mild consternation.

"Tea," I manage to stammer out, and he's got a teacup close to hand. He sits me up and feeds the warm beverage down my throat. I sigh and feel suddenly, momentarily, better. Things still look dizzy and square but I am absolutely certain of myself. Then I say, "You asked me if I wanted to marry you. Two years ago. Remember?"

"Oh," he says. I don't think I've ever seen him at a total loss for words, not even when he was a child gallivanting around the worlds and getting himself in horrible trouble. "Oh," he says again, and stares at me wide-eyed like I am the Arm of Asheth with spears pointed his way.

He starts speaking again, "Millie, I--"

But he's looking at me so guiltily that I can't let him stand there and feel horrible, I have to talk over him. I don't want to be the person who gets looked at like that. "No, Christopher, I know. I saw. Magic mirror in the attic room in the ruins."

"Oh." Twice in one conversation, I think, he's been run out of words now. A voice in the back of my head says, _tree-UMPH!_ , but this is serious.

"S-silly Christopher." My teeth are chattering a little again and I huddle under the down and blankets. He reaches out and strokes my forehead. "That's why I. I mean. Make it much easier for you. But I might fall in love too. With someone else, I mean."

He looks puzzled. "Are you in love with me?" he asks, anxious. "I'm not going to agree to an arrangement if it's horribly disappointing to you, I mean --"

"You're my best friend," I tell him. "I'll happily live in Chrestomanci Castle with you. Just not on a deserted island."

"You didn't answer my question." Christopher is the only person I know who can look haughty and concerned at once.

"I d-don't think the answer matters."

"But it was all you were talking about, when I asked!"

"When you asked," I explain, "I didn't know why. I thought you meant for the usual reasons. Now I know it's a way of helping my best friend. Much d-different." I burrow into the covers and start coughing. He hands me the tea again, and I sip at it.

He looks me right in the eye, fierce as anything. This, I am told, is Christopher being terrifying, but it doesn't terrify me -- maybe because I'm an enchantress, maybe because I'm used to him. He says, "But I _do_ love you, Millie."

"Yes, good. I know that. I love you too, or I wouldn't have offered. But -- not like a fit, or a shower of rain." I giggle a little. I wind up coughing again, a bit, and catch my breath. He looks at me, worried or confused. "I know what that looks like now," I explain. "It looks like you being superior and saying," I mimic, " _Grant_ , at the end of all your sentences. Not much different than anything else you do, except for the kissing. That's very different."

" _Millie!_ " He turns bright red, but I am smiling, and he sees that I am not too ill to be the target of a well-aimed throw pillow. I pitch one right back. That is why they are called throw pillows, after all.

 


End file.
